Action Now: No Locals. Kooks Only!

No Locals. Kooks Only! Yeah I said it—I’m fully backing the fuckin’ kooks up in here: the nerds, the geeks, the artsy-asses, the thinkers, the tinkers, the readers, the painters, and all the guys and gals who give zero about what anyone else is doing—the skaters who have no interest in following the status quo. That said, I am most definitely not backing the locals-only vibes, the jock mentality, the bullying bros, the marketeering mutantations, and the fashionista freaks who’ve made it their job to try and coerce others to fall in line and think like them. Not gonna happen! Basically, I saw a quote somewhere recently that said “No Locals. Kooks Only.” and it resonated with my skateboarding perspective, big time—It got me so stoked that I had to write this week’s Action Now column about it.

As long as I’ve been in skateboarding the raddest skaters have always been the freaks and kooks: Mark Gonzales, Neil Blender, Ed Templeton, Simon Woodstock, Lance Mountain, Eric Jensen, Big Dave, Adam Colton, Bruno Sirera Sorondo, and many, many more. If you don’t know all these weirdos already please look them up and get aquatinted, you will not regret it. Anyway, the way I see it is that localism is fear and it breeds bullying and hate, and that’s not rad. I’m not interested! Growing up my skater friends and I were repeatedly picked on pushed around by the jocks and hillbillies for being different, not respecting the status quo, and acting different by riding skateboards un their turf, but today there are actual skaters who fully embody this very same code of the jockery/hillbillity/localism. We have an infestation in our skate community these days of entitled, meat-headed regulators trying to tell us what’s cool and right—that we need to be more like them, wear more gear, win more sports, ride certain boards, skerp the proper derp, and do the cool-guy moves that everyone else is doing. HELLO! NO! Being a kook is the best part of skateboarding—it means that there are no rules to follow and you and I get to make it up as we go along. You want to bomb hills? You do that! You wanna walk up and down your log of a long-ass skateboard? get some, homie! You tryinta no-comply and wallie off of every single damn thing in your path? Go on with your bad self then! Skateboarding is yours and your kooky approach is what keeps it interesting and fresh. I guess all’s I’m asking is that you disregard the local, cool-guy mentality and stay kooking it hard and know that there’s millions of us kooks out here—know for certain that I’m out here backing you up and getting kooky too: footbraking through hairpins, beanplanting off of fire hydrants, playing S.K.A.T.E. on the flat bottom of the Mega Ramp, kick flipping on electric skateboards, and filming raw runs uphill. Shredlove!

Also, please make sure to spread the word about this and add any comments ya have below in the comment section so that we can discuss them on-air tonight once we go live. Shredlove and thanks for checking out Wheelbase Magazine and my column!

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I just want to reiterate that the comments and ideas presented above are published with the sole purpose to create dialogue, not as instruction. If any of these ideas get your panties in a bunch please first: relax, and then pluck and place said undergarments in a more comfortable position and let’s have a heathy skater-to-skater chat. The live streaming Periscope discussion for this week’s Action Now column begins at 5PM PST tonight (3/4/2016).